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en-usTechdirt. Stories filed under "vaccine"https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/td-88x31.gifhttps://www.techdirt.com/Thu, 14 May 2015 01:04:42 PDTHere's A Serious Alternative To Big Pharma: CubaGlyn Moodyhttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150512/09490530976/heres-serious-alternative-to-big-pharma-cuba.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150512/09490530976/heres-serious-alternative-to-big-pharma-cuba.shtml
Techdirt often points out that the current system of funding the creation of life-saving drugs is broken. But the obvious question is: what can you put in its place? The answer includes things like prizes, but also, it seems, Cuba:

Cuba has for several years had a promising therapeutic vaccine against lung cancer. The 55-year trade embargo led by the US made sure that Cuba was mostly where it stayed.

Leaving aside the fact that politics probably got in the way of saving lives (again), the more interesting issue is how Cuba managed to come up with a lung cancer vaccine. Here's the explanation from the Wired article quoted above:

Though the country is justly famous for cigars, rum, and baseball, it also has some of the best and most inventive biotech and medical research in the world. That's especially notable for a country where the average worker earns $20 a month. Cuba spends a fraction of the money the US does on healthcare per individual; yet the average Cuban has a life expectancy on par with the average American. "They’ve had to do more with less," says [Roswell Park Cancer Institute's CEO] Johnson, "so they’ve had to be even more innovative with how they approach things. For over 40 years, they have had a preeminent immunology community."

The cancer vaccine is not the only important drug Cuba has managed to develop with its limited resources. According to Wired, Cuban scientists have come up with their own vaccines for meningitis B and hepatitis B, and monoclonal antibodies for kidney transplants. That suggests the success of the "do more with less" approach isn't just a one-off, but can be applied consistently to deliver results.

That's important, and not just for people who desperately need new drugs. Big pharma is one of the main industries pushing pseudo-trade agreements like TPP and TTIP. Some of the worst elements in those are driven by that industry's desire to obtain longer patent protection and delay the entry of generics, with the justification that Big Pharma "needs" these extended monopolies to pay for costly research into novel drugs. Alternative approaches like Cuba's, which require far lower investments, offer the hope not just of doing "more with less", but also of calling the pharmaceutical giants' bluff that only they can come up with life-saving new treatments.

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]]>doing-more-with-lesshttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20150512/09490530976Mon, 16 Dec 2013 17:00:00 PSTDailyDirt: Tis The Season To Catch The FluJoyce Hunghttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110912/22293515923/dailydirt-tis-flu-season.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110912/22293515923/dailydirt-tis-flu-season.shtmlincrease in flu activity, and it appears that the predominant strain of flu found in patients who have been hospitalized so far is H1N1 -- the "Swine Flu" that caused a global pandemic in 2009 but is now a human seasonal flu virus. Here are a few links about the flu season, pandemics, and vaccines.

The flu pandemic of 1918 killed more than 50 million people worldwide. The virus was a bird virus that had, by chance, acquired the ability to travel via coughing and sneezing, which enabled it to infect a person who then spread it others, starting the pandemic. Could an outbreak of that scale and lethality happen again? Possibly, but there are many events that have to come together just the right way for that to occur, and there's no way to predict it.[url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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]]>urls-we-dig-uphttps://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110912/22293515923Thu, 4 Apr 2013 17:00:00 PDTDailyDirt: Fighting The Next PandemicMichael Hohttps://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110105/20125212539/dailydirt-fighting-next-pandemic.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110105/20125212539/dailydirt-fighting-next-pandemic.shtmlH7N9 strain that has no vaccine (yet!) and is starting to infect and kill people (instead of sticking to birds). We're just about coming to the tenth anniversary of SARS, and we're still creating over 100 million flu vaccines every year using egg embryos -- a process that takes months, time that we might not have if a really serious flu strain spreads quickly across the globe. Here are a few projects that are making vaccines more quickly.